Casino currency specialist Matsui has seen strong sales for its chip product embedded with radio frequency identification tags (RFID) available under its technology licensing deal with Walker Digital Table Systems LLC.
So said Shigeki Machida (pictured), managing director at Matsui Asia Ltd, in an interview with GGRAsia. For a number of years, the brand has been licensing Walker Digital’s high-frequency RFID technology – known as phase jitter modulation (PJM), and currently in version 3.0 – for chips Matsui produces. Such chips can be used with Walker Digital’s ‘smart’ tables.
There has been extensive reporting recently of a shift within the land-based casino industry in Macau and elsewhere toward smart tables for the purposes of game security, and also to collect more detailed data on player behaviour that can potentially be analysed for operational efficiency.
Mr Machida stated: “Recently we have been supplying a lot of chips with their [Walker Digital’s PJM 3.0] specification.”
He added: “We got very big orders from three properties: one from Canada; a second one for a new project in [South] Korea; and a third one for a casino in Manila.”
The executive added: “We supplied millions of chips [in aggregate] to those three properties recently.”
He was speaking to GGRAsia at the recent Global Gaming Expo (G2E) Asia casino-industry trade show in Macau.
A Matsui-specific security feature for the company’s chips and plaques is the use of what Mr Machida terms “invisible printing”.
He stated: “We use a special ink, which is exclusively supplied to us.”
It can be used to form images on the casino currency invisible to the naked eye, and that cannot even be seen via ultraviolet light wands. Instead, the images can only be authenticated on the chips by a piece of Matsui-developed handheld scanning technology called ‘MG Eye’.
Another product Matsui offers to casino operators is what it terms its ‘EM Gate’ (pictured, left), meaning electromagnetic gate. It is a scanning gate that can be fitted either to public entrances or staff entrances on a casino floor, that triggers an alarm if someone attempts to take casino currency off the floor.
While electromagnetic scanners have been in operation for security uses “for many years”, Mr Machida stated it was “difficult” initially to “put this technology together with RFID” so that it could detect chips tagged in that way.
Though he added: “We achieved a kind of breakthrough on that.”
